


Things Which Brought Us Here

by halotolerant



Category: Ballet Shoes - Noel Streatfeild, Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Genre: Air Transport Auxilliary, Crossover, F/F, WRNS, World War II, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 23:55:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5517836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Hello,” Peggy said now, holding her hand out across the dining table to Petrova, who she was directly opposite. “Second Officer Peggy Blackett, WRNS.”</p><p>“First Officer Petrova Fossil, ATA.” Petrova grinned and accepted the hand</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things Which Brought Us Here

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deepdarkwaters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/gifts).



> Deepdarkwaters - I loved your Yuletide Letter, and when you mentioned Petrova in a possible relationship, and that it could be a crossover with another canon of a similar timeline, I immediately though of the 'Swallows and Amazons' canon. I hope it's one you know. If not, I hope this Yuletide Treat should be readable all the same. Thank you so much for an inspiring prompt.

“It is the attic room, I’m afraid,” Mrs Reginalds said, wheezing a little as she climbed the stairs. “But of course we do have the, ahem, indoor washing facilities on the first floor.”

 

Petrova murmured in a way that she hoped sounded suitably impressed, and followed on, round yet another curve in the staircase before they reached the small top landing, and Mrs Reginalds opened a creaking door to reveal a single bedroom, simply furnished, with an appealing gabled window crisscrossed with anti-shatter tape.

 

“Looks splendid,” Petrova said, quite honestly – she’d only been living in barracks in Lossiemouth, after all. “Thank you very much.”

 

Mrs Reginalds gave a stately nod of acknowledgment. “Well you’re polite, at least,” she said. “I set great store by politeness, as did my late husband. I don’t think I hold with young ladies flying aeroplanes, nor do I think would dear Archibald, but one supposes it has got to be done by someone, and I dare say they ran out of even the older men, eventually.”

 

Petrova swallowed back her sigh, and smiled agreeably back, and reminded herself that, with this new posting, whatever else she had to put with, by this time tomorrow she would actually be flying a Spitfire.

 

\- - -

 

“Woolton Pie, girls,” Mrs Reginalds said when, later that evening, Petrova had come down to the dining room to join the other lodgers. Petrova was introduced to Dulcie Smith, a secretary at the Air Transport Auxiliary base where she would be soon working herself, and Sally Oates, a clerk for a law firm evacuated to Maidenhead from central London.

 

“Actually flying the planes!” Sally exclaimed, looking like she wasn’t sure if she wanted to be impressed. “I suppose you must meet a lot of RAF boys?”

 

“Who’d want ‘em?” Dulcie interjected darkly. “Pigs, the lot.”

 

“Dulcie,” Sally said primly, “you simply cannot talk that way about the fine young men who single-handedly…”

 

“Please, Sally, not tonight,” Dulcie retorted, and put her head in one hand. After a weighty sigh she looked up at Petrova and rolled her eyes for a moment and then gave a short laugh and a smile. “I’ll show you the way in tomorrow, if you like?”

 

“Thanks. That’d be super.”

 

Mrs Reginalds came back into the room, a serving spoon in hand, and stood poised over the pie, but not moving, looking over her table. She made a disgruntled noise.

 

“Again?” she asked.

 

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Sally muttered.

 

Before Petrova could ask for an explanation there was a sudden crashing sound in the hall, and then the dining room door burst open, revealing a young woman in a WRNS uniform, in the act of pulling from her head a dispatch rider cap, shaking loose her shingled hair. She was wearing trousers and knee-high boots, and her face looked wind-blown and friendly.

 

“Peggy, really,” Mrs Reginalds said. “This is the third time this week.”

 

“And it’s only Wednesday,” Sally added, _sotto voce_.

 

“I am sorry, Mrs Reginalds.” The young woman – she was only Petrova’s own age, Petrova thought – pulled off her leather gloves, stuck them in her hat, stuck the whole bundle on the dresser and occupied the spare chair. “There’s a new road block at Fressingham.”

 

“You shouldn’t talk about that sort of thing!” Sally hissed. “Loose lips sink ships!”

 

“How many ships are sailing down the Fressingham road, I wonder?” Dulcie muttered, and Petrova saw Peggy and Dulcie exchange looks.

 

“Hello,” Peggy said now, holding her hand out across the dining table to Petrova, who she was directly opposite. “Second Officer Peggy Blackett, WRNS.”

 

“First Officer Petrova Fossil, ATA.” Petrova grinned and accepted the hand. “We have the same rank, though, when you compare across the services,” she added, for the benefit of the room, and because she would hate this Peggy to think her uppish. Indeed she was technically a civilian, but she was in no rush to admit that in front of Sally.

 

Peggy grinned even more widely. “Come to work at White Waltham?”

 

“Yes. I’ve been based in Scotland before, but they wanted me to come and teach some of the new bugs how to fly the Spitfires. Not that I’ve ever flown one, so I’ve got three days to work it out before I write the manual for the others.”

 

“Splendid!” The food was being passed round and Peggy helped herself to pie.

 

“What are you riding, Peggy?” Petrova asked.

 

“Triumph Speed Twin,” Peggy beamed. “Do you know bikes?”

 

“I used to work at a garage,” Petrova confessed, and saw with delight Peggy’s smile broaden.

 

“Petrova,” Sally said thoughtfully. “That sounds like rather a foreign name?”

 

Petrova took a slow gulp of her water and turned to her, trying to look polite. “My birth parents were Russian,” she explained. “My adoptive family wanted to name me suitably in their memory.”

 

“Adopted?” Sally said, in a tone that did not suggest warming to the idea.

 

“How thrilling!” Peggy exclaimed. Then she cleared her throat. “I’m sorry. I mean, I’m sorry about your parents.”

 

“They weren’t my parents,” Petrova said simply. “Or, I suppose, my mother and father were other people, if you see what I mean.”

 

“Hey, Peggy, any sign of something being done about the flooding on the road at Cladthorpe? Fred’s supposed to be taking me to the cinema on Friday in his car.” Dulcie reached for the dish of carrots and offered them round the table, and the conversation shifted to lighter matters.

 

\- - -

 

Petrova soon fell into a routine. She rose early, to her shift schedule, went into White Waltham, picked up her aircraft for the day, delivered or tested or returned it as needed and, eventually – there could be an awful lot of waiting and missing paperwork and officious men with small moustaches wanting to know why they hadn’t been consulted – picked up the one to go back and fly back home in time for supper.

 

Peggy, by contrast, was almost never on time. Despite rolling her eyes at Sally’s over-sensitive watchfulness, she still didn’t discuss where she worked or what she was carrying to and fro for it, but given her long and strange hours, Petrova had a shrewd idea it was something considerably more than the tea orders, or even ordinary classified documents.

 

“I suppose I was always destined for the Wrens,” Peggy said one evening, as she and Petrova ate their puddings together, having both been late for once and finding their food on a little tray in the dining room with a sorrowful note about it having got cold and _a little more courtesy really would be appreciated, even in these hard times._

 

“When I was small, I wanted to be a pirate,” Peggy continued, and took another spoonful of apple crumble eagerly. “Well, was a pirate, really - I mean we had a boat and we did awfully dreadful things.” She beamed.

 

Peggy really had, Petrova thought in a familiar groove of reflection, the loveliest smile; bright, slightly crooked teeth and lips that were always red and rather chapped. She had written to Pauline to ask her, in her next package of American cosmetics, to send more lip cream that could be passed on.

 

Already, when she’d found a tiny mess shop on an airbase selling an entirely random and very limited supply of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut, she’d given Peggy half the bar, pressed into her hand when they were both on the way out in the morning. She’d spent so much time looking forwards to Peggy’s reaction, and then run away before she could see it, suddenly bashful.

 

“When I was little, I had to go to ballet school,” Petrova confessed. “I was once a jumping bean in a pantomime. That was dreadful, if you like.”

 

“Really? No!” Peggy blinked at her. “I’m sorry, you just don’t seem very… ballet.”

 

“I really, really wasn’t,” Petrova confessed and burst out laughing. It was very easy to laugh when she was talking to Peggy, even about things she’d never thought funny before. “It was a way to get a job, though, despite being underage, and I needed the work. We all did – my two sisters and I.”

 

“Sisters? Were they… yours? Or adopted too?”

 

“We were all adopted, but they are my sisters,” Petrova said fiercely. “And the best sisters anyone could have.”

 

“Sorry.” Peggy bit her lip. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

 

“I know,” Petrova told her, relenting. “One does just get a bit sick of the way most people talk about it. Well anyway, they were – they are – the best sisters imaginable, but they were both very good at theatre and dancing, and I was rather… well, my sisters did everything better, is the thing.”

 

“I do know how that goes,” Peggy said, and sighed. “I’ve got one. One’s enough.”

 

“Where’s she now?”

 

“Also a Wren. Nancy, she’s called. She’s based at Portsmouth. Oh, but how she’d like to be out on a ship properly with the men, crossing the Atlantic and chasing U-boats.” Peggy shivered. “Is it terrible that I’m frightfully glad she isn’t allowed to?”

 

“One of my sisters is a prima ballerina, and the other’s over in LA being a film star.” Petrova folded her arms on the table in precisely the way she’d never been allowed to as a child. “I’m frightfully glad they won’t even think of service, and more to the point that there are people with a vested interest in looking after them and keeping them away from it all.”

 

“Wait a minute, is your sister Pauline Fossil?” Peggy’s eyes widened. “I didn’t make the connection but it is the same name?”

 

“Yes, Pauline’s my sister.” Petrova couldn’t help sighing a little. She had a funny feeling, just then, that she would have sacrificed having her name in the general history book of the world if Peggy would just have spoken it in the way she’d just said Pauline’s.

 

But Peggy was laughing again. “Oh you poor thing!” she exclaimed. “Having to grow up with such _girls_!”

 

From anyone else, or said in any other way, Petrova would have found that unspeakably rude. But she understood, in that moment, exactly what Peggy meant, and saw that Peggy had exactly understood her.

 

Petrova cleared her throat, and felt a strange sort of humming in her chest as they looked at each other.

 

The dining room door opened. Sally put her head round. “When you’ve quite finished,” she said, tetchily, “Mrs Reginalds does ask that you wash those up before it dries on.”

 

\- - -

 

After Petrova had been in Mrs Reginalds’ boarding house just over two months, she had a day of leave that turned out to coincide with one of Peggy’s, as they discovered whilst chatting over supper the week before. Petrova had started eating her supper regularly an hour and a half after the rest of the house, in order to keep the eternally late-working Peggy company. She had offered to Mrs Reginalds to cook for the two of them separately, if it would make things easier, but perhaps fortunately for her ongoing friendship with Peggy, Mrs Reginalds did not accept the offer.

 

Petrova, as Posy often liked to say, could burn a pan of water.

 

So they were eating rather cold steamed fish roll, with mugs of very hot rather weak black tea, to be followed by something involving apples, when Peggy got her pocket diary out, flipped the pages and said with a smile, “I say, that’s my day off too! Fancy that!”

 

Petrova knew all about stage fright.

 

To get yourself to do what needed to be done, she had learned, and learned the hard way, sometimes you just had to trick yourself into thinking you _were_ the character you wanted to be.

 

Just like right now, she could be, if she tried hard enough, the nonchalant, possibly even dashing pilot, about to ask another young lady a calm, casual friendly question, with no worry about how her interest might appear.

 

She even had the right costume on already.

 

“Well then,” she said, and smiled. “Would you like to go off together somewhere?”

 

“Super!” said Peggy, and put her diary away. “Now, what’s for pudding?”

 

\- - -

 

The plan for the day off was divided between a bus trip to the cinema, if wet, and a ride on Peggy’s bike into the country for a picnic, if fine.

 

Petrova had been dubious about the latter, much as she loved the idea in general.

 

“Are you sure you don’t mind driving it again on your day off?” she asked.

 

“Would be quite different anyway,” Peggy said, and smiled. “But anyhow, who said I was going to be the one driving?”

 

Petrova’s mouth fell open. “You don’t mean? On a Triumph? Oh I say!”

 

And so off they went into the countryside, sandwiches (assembled by Peggy, who said she had made enough sandwiches in her time to do it in her sleep) packed in the carrier and Petrova gripping the handlebars with glee, Peggy sitting pillion behind her and with her arms tight around Petrova’s waist.

 

Petrova was awfully glad that the speed and the wind would cover any sound of her gasping, especially when they went over a bump and Peggy’s hands shifted, brushing over her chest.

 

The roads were practically empty, and as they sped on towards the Thames, and the grasslands of wildflowers at Cookham, all the sound the whir of the engine and Peggy’s breathing in her ear, Petrova felt a moment’s brief, guilty delight even in the war, if it had caused this day to happen.

 

At the start of the grasslands, Petrova braked and turned off the bike’s engine, and they pushed it between them as they walked, chatting and laughing.

 

“I want to take you sailing, one day,” Peggy was saying. “I know you love your engines, but there’s nothing like putting a sail into the wind and skimming over a lake. Or ice sailing, which is even faster! One winter my sister and my friends and I spent all our time racing up and down, and scaring the poor people trying to skate.” She laughed.

 

Petrova thought about her own childhood, and the scrimped meals and the hand-me-downs, and holidays that relied on the generosity of old friends and even then came few and far between. It was odd; now, probably, between Posy and Pauline, and especially Pauline, and with Gum’s investments active once more, she probably had the wealthier family of the two of them.

 

But Peggy had been brought up with enough money. And that was quite another thing.

 

She felt a bit shy of talking about her own holidays, in comparison to Peggy’s, and told her more about her time in the theatre instead, building up all the humour of it until Peggy was shaking with laughter.

 

“It must, though,” Peggy said after a while – they were nearly at their picnic spot, on a rise near one of the Bronze Age burial mounds which Peggy said she loved to visit – “have been very hard, having to have people want to employ you when you’re only twelve. Twelve! It wouldn’t be legal in any other profession. When I was twelve I was…” she trailed off, laughing again, perhaps a little more self-consciously.

 

“Well my sisters loved it,” Petrova said. “Here we are,” she added, and began to spread out the rug. Peggy crouched nearby and opened up the picnic basket and got out plates and the lemon-substitute diluted in water they were calling ‘lemonade’. “Dresses and spangles and fairy wings – everything they could have wanted.”

 

“But not you,” Peggy said. She was putting the sandwiches on the plates from their box, and she stopped and looked at them, her gaze distant. “Would you believe I was the girly one, of the two of us? Nancy is… as fierce as they come, and a great leader and very sure of herself. She thought I was a bit wet, I think, for a while. And I thought so too, and then I realised, actually, I was just two years younger than her. She’s…” Peggy coughed. “The funny thing is, she’s engaged to be married, whereas I’m…” she trailed off, and turned away, and Petrova saw a ribbon of scarlet blush creeping up her neck.

 

Petrova bit her lip and took a deep breath. She dropped onto the blanket, kneeling across from Peggy, hands in her lap.

 

“One thing I did enjoy about dancing school,” she said, slowly, “was that I met a girl there. I… She’s married now, actually, but for a while…” She felt her heart pounding in her throat and tried to swallow it down and control her tongue, which wanted to stumble through the words in her eagerness to get them out and make everything clear. “This was a long time ago. But…”

 

Very slowly, Peggy looked up at her. She was bright red and looked terrified, and Petrova thought she was probably the same herself, or perhaps worse.

 

“Petrova,” Peggy said, and cleared her throat. “You really must understand that I’m not very brave. A bit of a galoot, actually.”

 

“I thought you were a pirate. I thought if a pirate wanted something, they took it.” Petrova’s hands were trembling. She was acting a scene she’d never played before, but it was coming strangely easily to her.

 

“Avast ye swabs,” Peggy murmured, and reached out her hand.

 

Petrova shuffled forward, and let herself be guided into a kiss.

 

Peggy’s lips were still dry, and her mouth tasted of artificial lemons, and her whole body, when Petrova dared to put a hand around her shoulders, was trembling.

 

Petrova pressed nearer and gathered her close, trying to share some warmth, and felt something like small fireworks going off across the whole span of her body.

 

They broke apart, breathing heavily, and Peggy was smiling again, rather completely beautifully.

 

“I’m sure you make wonderful sandwiches,” Petrova said. “But first, could we do that again?”

 

“Terrible girl,” Peggy said, sounding pleased, and laughed out once, joyfully, and held her arms out so that Petrova could drawn her down onto the rug.

 

\- - -

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> (FWIW, in my head Peggy takes encoded intercepts between listening stations and Bletchley Park)


End file.
